The advantages of the first option are clear.

Once you are tagged as a “right winger” or “left winger,” people assume that they know what you’re going to say. If you’re “on their side,” they read and nod approvingly, feeling ever so validated by yet another column that says precisely what they already thought. And if they assume they’ll disagree, or worse, that the column will annoy them, they can just skip it altogether or sharpen their proverbial pencils and bang out the inevitably dismissive talkback. Either way, though, we know what we’ll think of an argument – and of a writer – before we’ve even read a word. Ah, the eternal quest for a predictable and comfortable life.

But I’ve never thought that thinking, or citizenship – or love – work that way. If we love our children, do we validate them or criticize them? This is the wrong question, obviously, for the answer should depend on the context.  Parents who never have a kind or defending word to say about their child probably don’t love them enough. But parents who never critique their children are incompetent.

It’s true of marriage, too. None of us would want to be married to someone who never had a kind word to say about us or to us, or who never made clear that they were proud of us.

But if all we want is that validation, we’re probably better off buying an iPhone 4S and talking to Siri than being in a real relationship.

A functioning relationship is one in which our partner wants us to be better than the person we now are and can lovingly suggest, pretty regularly, how we might get there.

It’s an anemic conception of love that would describe our role as parents, spouses, lovers, friends – or citizens, no less – as assuming a position of constant validation or of relentless criticism.

That’s why some of us who write about Israel take a different approach. We don’t care about being neatly classifiable as “left” or “right”; because to love a country is not that different from loving a person. It means defending but also critiquing. It means loving unconditionally but knowing that love does not mean overlooking serious flaws. To love Israel, I believe, is to know that the Jewish state is not just a flag or an army or some holy place. To love Israel is to love the real Israel, with all its many warts and imperfections. And to love Israel is to know that there is a difference between a wart and a serious disease; when an imperfection is so serious as to threaten the entire enterprise, then the most loyal thing that one can do is to insist that Israel be better.

But this approach makes life complicated for readers because they don’t know, up front, precisely what they’re going to get. They will have to read, and then think.

Not everyone responds so well to that sort of challenge. In recent weeks and months when I’ve defended the very legitimacy of the idea of a Jewish state, or pointed to the Palestinians’ obvious disinterest in peace, or stated my abiding belief that none of us (tragically) are going to see this conflict resolved in our own lifetimes, then one entire set of readers trots out the “he’s a peace-talk-pessimist” line. He must be in Bibi’s pocket. He doesn’t care about peace.

But the opposite is also true – critique this government’s entirely unimaginative mishandling of the so-called peace process, or point a spotlight at the medieval religious leadership that has Netanyahu wrapped around its pinky, and the opposite camp goes berserk. One regular reader wrote to say that he used to like my columns, but now I’m “beginning to sound a bit like a Meretznik, or even worse – like Thomas Friedman!” (Except for those three elusive Pulitzers, I guess.) Meretz is mostly gone, of course, but the derisive label seems likely to outlive the party. If you ever sound like them then you obviously don’t care about Israel. You’re hostile to Judaism. Or you’re blind to the dangers of our enemies. And if you ever sound like Likud then you don’t care about peace. And if you occasionally sound like both then you don’t know how to think. Eventually Leonard Fein will write a column in The Forward (June 23, 2011) called “Will the Real Daniel Gordis Please Stand Up?” Because you either seek peace (or care about social justice) or you defend Israel.

But you obviously can’t do both. Right? At a recent conference of the American Jewish Committee in New York one participant noted that she prefers, instead of “left” and “right,” the labels “prophets” and “guardians” – for those labels each cast the “other” in the best possible light. This nomenclature reminds us that “prophets” are more than mere leftwing social critics – they reflect a critical dimension of the Jewish tradition, Judaism’s classic vision of social justice. And “guardians” is better than “hate-mongers” or “peace-pessimists,” or “Bibi-supporters,” apparently, because every people needs “guardians,” as does every state. To be a guardian is not to be a dinosaur, but rather to recognize that the State we’re discussing is sacred, in desperate need of protection.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that “prophets versus guardians” still isn’t good enough. For the distinction nonetheless implies that either you’re a “prophet” or a “guardian.” You choose one. And then you write, vote, agree or disagree.

But life doesn’t work that way. We dare not force people to pick a camp, no matter how elegant the terminology. The Hebrew prophets railed against the injustices of ancient Israelite society but they were desperately concerned about the survival of Jewish sovereignty. And guardians need to protect against not only the obvious threats from the outside but also against the cancers that threaten to devour us from within. Will the Jewish people be any better off if Israel falls because of Jews than if it is undermined by the Palestinians? Either way, we’d be done for.

Genuinely loving this country means that there will be moments when we defend it and other occasions on which we bemoan its grievous shortcomings. Is that muddled thinking? Does that merit the cynical demand that our “real” self “please stand up”? I think not. It reflects, I think, the real messiness of life, of love and of hope. Imagine our world, and our discourse, if every one of us found the renewed courage to read, to think and to recognize that those with whom we instinctively tend to disagree might still have something to teach us.

It’s tempting to laugh, of course, to point to the absurdity that can result when a religious tradition develops thoroughly unfettered by any contact with or influence from the outside world, guided by clerics with the narrowest intellectual training imaginable. But before we point with derision to Saudi Arabia and some dark corners of Europe, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look around and remind ourselves of what’s unfolding right here at home.

Israel, our perky start-up nation, now has another credit of which to boast. We have our very own Rosa Parks. Her name is Tania Rosenblit; she’s the young woman who refused to move to the back of the bus when instructed to do so by haredi passengers on a bus from Ashdod to Jerusalem. It’s almost 2012 – practically 99 years since Rosa Parks was born. But parts of the Jewish state are still struggling to enter the 20th century, which, of course, ended over a decade ago.

Thankfully, and none too soon, Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, rushed to condemn the segregation of men and women on public buses. “We [the ultra-Orthodox] don’t have the authority to force our ideas on others,” he asserted. “This state does not belong to the haredi community.”

Ah, so there’s the problem. The issue is not that it’s wrong to relegate women to the back of the bus (why don’t the men go to the back of the bus and let the women sit up front if they’re so worried?) or that the segregation of men and women on buses is absurd (does insurmountable temptation really lurk at every stop?) but simply because the haredim don’t (yet?) have the political power they need to enforce this. Metzger’s concern was only tactical – the haredim were over-reaching. Not a word about the shamefulness of a society in which men and women cannot respectfully and properly occupy the same public space or how similar to Saudi Arabia we seem intent on becoming. Will there be a separate section on the bus for women carrying uncut fruit?

Buses are far from the full extent of it, of course. Now we learn that the Karmiel Employment Bureau has assigned different days for men and women seeking unemployment compensation. But lest we worry that this is fundamentalism-creep, rest assured, it’s only an administrative nicety. It is “more convenient” for men and women to use the office’s services on different days, the office explained to Ynet. “It prevents stress and chaos in the waiting room and is more aesthetic.” Aesthetic? How’s that, exactly?

And let’s not forget the still-simmering controversy over women singing at army ceremonies. Since halachic rulings are apparently immutable, Israel’s noble political leaders are resorting to – what else? – technology. That, after all, is where we Israelis shine. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar has a brilliant solution: he simply puts his fingers in his ears when women sing at army events. (I would pay for a photograph of that.)

Not to be outdone, and perhaps in order not to offend those singing young women (who are actually in the army serving their country – yes, some people still do that, apparently) who might find the sight of the state’s chief rabbi with his fingers stuck in his ears somewhat disconcerting or even offensive, Shas MK Nissim Ze’ev has a much better idea: religious men should simply use earplugs when women sing. Brilliant. One only hopes that they remember to remove them before heading into battle. I’m told that being able to hear your commander can increase effectiveness in combat. Unless you had no intention of obeying his orders in the first place, I guess.

And we have, infinitely worse, the burning of mosques, vicious and violent attacks on Israeli soldiers by radicalized settlers and an emerging national debate as to whether (or when) the army is going to have to start shooting them. And our government? It’s tiptoeing around, doing nothing and saying little, its only genuine concern that the coalition not be weakened.

AH, THE joys of Jewish sovereignty, the nobility of Jewish independence. A.D. Gordon, Ahad Ha’am, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion may have all disagreed in life, but now they have one thing in common – they are undoubtedly turning in their graves. That, by the way, was the real absurdity of those much-discussed ads begging Israelis abroad to come home. Those pot-shots at Jewish life in America (gratuitous and simplistic, a bit offensive and not entirely wrong) utterly missed the point – maybe those Israelis live in America because what’s unfolding in Israel is so thoroughly unappealing to them. Maybe they’ve noticed that back “home” in Israel the pockets of outrage against all of this violence and medievalism are tiny, virtually muted.

It’s Hanukka, our collective reminder that in an era of darkness, Jews struggle to create more light. Do those of us unafraid of cucumbers or mixed buses, those of us who believe that women serving their country ought to be able to sing, those of us who are ashamed of a country that takes only the feeblest action against Jews who do to mosques what anti- Semites did to our synagogues not that long ago, possess the courage of which this holiday is a reminder? Will we, like the Maccabees, take our country back before it’s too late?

It’s hard to know. So far, it seems we are so desperately afraid of our external enemies that we’ll support at all costs a government that just watches as the country rots from within.

At moments like this, it’s hard not to think about the Altalena affair. Tragic though it was, it was the defining moment at which Ben-Gurion made it clear to all that there would be one central authority in the Jewish state. Those who sought to subvert it would be treated in accordance with what they were – threats to the state’s very existence. One prays that some progress can be made here without the use of force. But if it cannot, it’s worth remembering that we once had a prime minister who knew what had to be done.

But then, of course, it’s been a very long time since we’ve had a leader with that character, that confidence, those deeply held commitments. These days, with Hanukka reminding us of the enormous power of convictions, it would be nice to have some leadership with any principles at all.

To a battered Jewish world, though, that “day of infamy” may have been a blessing in a horrific disguise.  For matters could have been much worse had the Japanese not attacked. Absent that Japanese provocation, how much longer would it have taken for the United States to enter the war? How much more of Europe might Hitler have conquered had Japan not awakened the hibernating American giant-to-be? How much stronger would his grip on North Africa have become? How many more Jews would have been lost? Had he seized the Yishuv, could a Jewish state ever have arisen?

What was a “day of infamy” to many was a day of salvation for others. The Japanese attack was both a horror and a relief. It caused untold suffering, but may have saved the free world. There’s a lesson to be learned from that – dangers come in many different forms – and so does salvation.

It’s become popular, these days, to warn that 2011 is looking ever more like 1938. And to an extent, that’s true. There are, indeed, dangers, and the similarities are eerie. Once again, the Jews – and this time, their state – are singled out for opprobrium, and once again, the West pretends not to notice. Israel is the only country on the planet about which there’s a debate regarding its right to exist. The United States and Europe know what Iran is up to and what its intentions are, but for years did virtually nothing. Neville Chamberlain would have been proud.

Once again, fear and hatred of the Jews comes from the most bizarre quarters. Even as Israel was battling the second intifada, Europeans ranked North Korea and Israel as the two greatest threats to world peace. Hamas runs one of the most misogynous regimes on the planet, doing nothing, for example, to stop honor killings in which fathers execute their adult daughters for alleged sexual improprieties – yet American college students (including women, of course) urge international support for Hamas – because the Jewish state simply must be stopped.

And as was the case in the 1930s, resurgent nationalism fuels itself by lashing out at the Jew. Iran shares no border with Israel, but urges its destruction. Even before the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis fared so well in Egypt’s recent elections, the secular government rattled its sabers and hinted at the possibility of terminating its peace with Israel.

Rebuffed by the EU, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made exacerbating tensions with Israel a cornerstone of his foreign policy. With Syria’s Bashar Assad ever more likely to fall, when will conflict with Israel be his most logical next step, since hatred of the Jew is one of the few things that can still unite Syrians?

Yes, there are discomfiting parallels. Close to home and far away, real dangers lurk. But there is also danger to the danger. Utterly convinced that the world is aligned against us, it’s too easy to conclude that we have no choice but to man the barricades and to fire away until we’re out of ammo. Then, we imagine, we’ll deal with whatever’s left after the dust settles.

But while that sort of Armageddon thinking may make for gripping Hollywood scenes, it does nothing to promote wisdom. When Michele Bachmann  addresses an American Jewish conference proclaiming “not one inch” and thousands of Jews leap to their feet with calls of “Bachmann for President,” we’re in hysteria-land.

Ariel Sharon did not say “not one inch.” Binyamin Netanyahu does not say “not one inch.” Even Avigdor Lieberman, toiling tirelessly to create a state in which few of us would want to live, does not say “not one inch.” But people love a rallying cry, especially in the face of danger. Bumper stickers, after all, are so much more appealing than thinking.

Michele Bachmann knows better than all of Israel’s leaders? So, too, do the wildly cheering crowds at New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel? Of course there’s no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the present moment. But “not one inch” as a policy means “war forever.” Yet that’s OK, isn’t it? It’s fun to cheer Michele Bachmann in a New York hotel. So what if it means that Israelis will continue to die, year after year, endlessly? What are we going to cheer instead? Moderation? Thought?

That’s where 1938 will get you.

Once you know the world is one big danger, you just batten down the hatches and toss thinking to the wind. European governments fund left-leaning organizations that rightly worry us? Let’s create convoluted laws to tax the funding into insignificance.

Let’s tamper with the Supreme Court (one of Israel’s few well-functioning governmental bodies, whatever one might think of some of its rulings) while we’re at it. It doesn’t matter that the government’s recent slew of legislative innovations has horrified both centrist Israelis and Zionist American Jews, or that it has elicited warnings from world leaders. After all, these are dire times.

After all, there are enemies out there… we have to get them before they get us.

Or do we? Despite all the similarities to 1938, let’s not lose sight of the overwhelming differences. American Jews of 2011 are nothing like the timid, intentionally invisible Jews of 1938. Millions of American Christians are passionate, politically powerful supporters of Israel. Congressional support is solid. The Jews are no longer landless and homeless, but sovereign. Much of the West is even awakening (though admittedly too slowly) to the dangers of Iran and radical Islam.

To be sure, we have enemies. And too many of our friends are complacent, naïve and ignorant. But we’re not the forgotten, powerless, ignored masses that we were 70 years ago.

Is this the moment to abandon any semblance of moderation, to risk becoming our own worst enemies by destroying from within what our foes would destroy from without? Last time around, our enemies made terrible strategic mistakes that ultimately led to their downfall. What if they do not do that this time? Are we determined to make the mistakes for them?

His death was considered a loss of a once-in-a-generation leader.

Amazingly, though, outside that community, almost no one noticed. Most Israelis could not name him and were unaware that he had died.

Even those American Jews who know, however vaguely, of the Mir Yeshiva, could not have named the person who headed it. Nor did they hear that he had died.

We’re living increasingly in a world of parallel but non-intersecting Jewish universes, each with its own ideals and heroes, neighborhoods and values, each too readily dismissive of the other. In the aftermath of Rabbi Finkel’s passing, and the images of his funeral which were a sea of black, extending down entire city streets, it’s worth comparing this moment in our history to another Jewish funeral, also attended by some 100,000 people.

That was the funeral of the brilliant Yiddish writer Y.L. Peretz, who died in Warsaw just shy of a century ago. Professor Ruth Wisse, writing in Commentary magazine in March 1991, described his funeral as follows: “Published reports of the funeral lingers on the by-then extraordinary fact that each of the splintering political, religious, social and cultural groups was officially represented in the procession – Hebraists and Yiddishists, observant Jews and all manner of secularists, Zionists and socialists and Territorialists in all their tangled branches, conservative community leadership and radical workers’ opposition.”

What a striking difference! How many secular Jews could be found at Rabbi Finkel’s funeral? How many observant Jews not in black? None of the former, I would imagine. And very, very few of the latter.

Which leads me to the following question: Who is there anywhere in the Jewish world whose passing would evoke the sense of shared loss that was felt when Peretz died? Is there anyone in the Jewish world – in Israel, the United States, or anywhere else – who would be mourned by secularists and religious Jews alike, conservatives and liberals, Zionists and those more dubious about the Jewish state? Were Haim Nahman Bialik to die now, would the Israeli religious community mark his passing? (In 1934, it did.) Were Rabbi Shlomo Goren alive now, would American Reform and Conservative Jews see his loss as theirs, too? Would Israeli Orthodox Jews take note of the loss of Abba Hillel Silver? There are (a very few) Israeli national leaders who will likely be mourned across the religious divide, but will their passing be marked in any meaningful way in American Jewish life? Is there a single American Jewish leader of whom Israelis would take note after his or her death? To tell the truth, I can’t think of a single Jewish person whose loss would evoke the kind of cross-chasm mourning that Peretz’s did. We live in a very different and much impoverished age.
What matters, of course, is not really who mourns whom at funerals. What matters is who takes whom seriously during their lifetime. And increasingly, I fear, we take seriously those people who are more or less like us. We embrace (and then “like” on Facebook, or forward to others) the views of those with whom we agree, and disparage (and don’t “like” or Retweet, and never forward) the views of those whose views we don’t share.

If people on the “Right” read writers like Peter Beinart, it’s not because they think that they might have something to learn from him (even if they disagree with his conclusions), but rather, simply to show how completely off-base he is. And when people on the “Left” read Caroline Glick, it’s also not because they think there might be something to glean from arguments with which they ultimately disagree. It’s simply to confirm their (incorrect) preconceived notion that anyone to their right is a Neanderthal.

How different we are from the sages of the Talmud, who carefully preserved the opinions of those with whom they disagreed, including even those opinions that were ultimately rejected.

Our sages understood that even the “losing” positions had what to teach, that there are moral and strategic insights to be gleaned even from those whose conclusions we do not share.

But are there any rabbis in Israel’s religious community who urge their students to read Ahad Ha’am’s vision for Zion or Amos Oz’s social critiques, or secular Israeli high school teachers who encourage their students to read Rav Kook’s (not so disparaging) religious assessment of secular Judaism? We’re all part of this troubling phenomenon, to some extent. After all, don’t we subscribe to those newspapers and magazines that say what we already think, and avoid like the plague those that might cause us to rethink the positions to which we’re now committed? Aren’t we, too, divided between CNN and Fox watchers, each of us proud of the fact that we never watch the other? Perhaps, I sometimes wistfully allow myself to imagine, it is time for those on the Left to subscribe to The Weekly Standard, and those on the Right to buy The Nation.

For the vast majority of the Jewish world, the death of Rabbi Finkel went unnoticed. And even for those outside his community who did hear about it, his passing and his funeral are yesterday’s news. But those images of the sea of black – and only black – on the streets of Jerusalem during his funeral procession ought to be a reminder of how different our world is from the world that Y.L. Peretz inhabited. Our response, I believe, ought to be to ask how we can begin to recreate the deeply interconnected Warsaw community, so lost in so many ways.

Perhaps we ought to start with reading, reminding ourselves that the important reading we do is not the reading with which we agree, but the reading that actually makes us think.

Before the Shalit deal fades entirely from view, many of us are hoping that you have noticed what you unwittingly unleashed.  I don’t mean the next wave of terror or the terrible decisions that Israel must make before the next kidnapping.  We knew about those even before last week.  But last Tuesday, all of us – those opposed as well as those in favor (and there were persuasive arguments on both sides) – rediscovered something magnificent about this country.  It would be tragic if we returned to business as usual without pausing to take note.

In addition to Gilad Shalit, we got one more thing in return that few of us could have expected; we got a reminder of the abundant goodness that still resides at the very core of this society.  You could see it everywhere.  Compare the speeches on our side, celebrating life and freedom, to the blood-thirsty Palestinian harangues calling for renewed terror and additional kidnappings.   Compare the respectful restraint of our press to Shahira Amin’s immoral and abusive interview in Egypt.  But more than anything, we saw this reservoir of goodness in the streets – in the people so moved that they could hide neither the tears in their eyes nor the lumps in their throats.  We saw it in the throngs along the roads, people who wanted Shalit to know that they, too, celebrated his long overdue freedom.  And we saw it in the hundreds of people in Mitzpe Hila who continued dancing long after he’d entered his house and closed the door.  

We all felt it – it was innocent, pure and thoroughly decent.  We were witness that day to an entire country believing in something again.  Those young people outside the Shalit home were singing not only about Shalit, but about this land, this people, and about a future in which they still believe.  Did you see them?  Women and men, religious and secular, dancing with abandon in celebration of freedom?  Did you hear them singing anachnu ma’aminim benei ma’aminim …. “We’re believers, the children of believes, and we have no one on whom to depend, other than our Father in heaven”?  You didn’t miss it, did you?  Hundreds of people of all walks of Israeli life, proclaiming without hesitation their belief in something bigger than themselves?

The reason that the trade was wildly popular, Mr. Prime Minister, wasn’t ultimately about Gilad Shalit. It was about Israel.  About a country desperate to transcend the cynicism, that still wants to believe that it’s worth believing in.  Shouldn’t we – and you – therefore ask ourselves what can we do next to justify people’s belief in this place?   What will it take to make this a country that its citizens can love even when we’re not freeing a captive?

How about if we start by eradicating evil?  Take but one example and deal with it.  There’s a small but vicious group of kids living over the Green Line who bring inestimable shame on the Jewish people.  They burn mosques, tear down olive trees and sow fear everywhere – all with the implicit support of their rabbis.  And they make many young Israelis deeply ashamed of this entire enterprise.  Last week, you showed us that you do know how to take decisive action.  So do it again.  Rein them in.  Arrest them.  Cut off funding to their yeshivot.  If you show this generation of Israelis that your government stands for goodness even when that means making tough domestic decisions, you’ll unleash a wave of Zionist passion like we haven’t felt here for a generation.  It wouldn’t be any harder to do than what you just did, and it would actually do even more good for Israel than getting one soldier back.

And beyond goodness, there’s also Jewishness.  No, we shouldn’t make too much of that anachnu ma’aminim benei ma’aminim song, but admit – it’s not what you expect to see lots of secular people singing.  Yet they did.  Because this is a strange and wondrous country; not so deep down, even “non-religious” people aren’t “non-religious.”  Just like their observant counterparts, they’re searching, struggling, yearning – and at moments like that, they know that the well from which they hope to draw their nourishment is a Jewish well.

That’s why it was wonderful that you quoted from Isaiah (the Haftarah for Parashat Bereishit) in your speech.  It was your suggestion, I hope, that at its core, this society must be decent, but it must also be Jewish.  You know what the main problem with the summer’s Social Justice protests was?  It wasn’t the naïve embrace of high school socialism, or the utter incoherence of the demands.  It was the fact that there was simply nothing Jewish about their vision for Israel.  Dafni Leef and her comrades could have given the same vacuous speeches at Occupy Wall Street.  Or in Sweden, for that matter.  Those inane speeches were testimony to the failure of our educational systems and of Israel’s religious leadership.  The Yoram Kaniuk affair and the court’s willingness to let him declare himself “without religion” is a reflection not on him, but on the appallingly uninteresting variety of Judaism that the State has come to represent.  Can you – or anyone else – name even one single powerful idea that’s come from any of Israel’s Chief Rabbis in the past decade or two?  Me, neither.

But lo and behold, it turns out that Israel’s young people still want to believe in something.  We haven’t given them the tools to articulate it, but they still intuit that whatever we become, it’s got to be Jewish.  So ride that wave, too, Mr. Prime Minister.  What would it take to shape a country where the profundity at the core of Jewish tradition became once again the subject of discourse in our public square?  Does Judaism in the twenty-first century suddenly have to become dull and backward, or can we restore the intellectual and moral excellence that once characterized it?  Can you take this on, too?  Appoint the right people?  Build the right schools?  Can you help make this a country encourages those young people now searching for Jewish moral moorings?

For or against, hardly a single one of us is not thrilled that Gilad Shalit is home.  He deserved his life back.  But so, too, does this country.  Shalit, hopefully, will now get better and stronger with each passing day.  Israel must do the same.  It needs to get better – we need to be honest about the evils lurking in our midst, and we must exorcise them.  And we must become stronger, which we can do only by engaging with the roots that brought us back home in the first place.

Can you do this?  Many of us hope so.  Because if this fails, it will in the long run have made no difference that Gilad Shalit came home.  But if it succeeds, we might just come to see his liberation as the turning point in our collective return to believing in ourselves.

With Israel’s international standing crumbling and its internal cohesion fraying, Netanyahu urgently needed to restore Israeli morale. ….  A Foreign Affairs article …

No one in Israel is calling the agreement signed for Gilad Shalit’s freedom a good deal. On many levels it is terrible. Israel is releasing more than 1000 prisoners, several hundred of them hardened terrorists, for one soldier. For the first time, the Jewish state essentially acquiesced as a terrorist organization dictated the list of prisoners to be released, including several responsible for mass deaths of Israeli citizens, a notion that would once have been unthinkable. Israel may well have given its enemies incentive to kidnap more soldiers. And the terrorists now being released are likely to attack and kill Israelis in the future.

Despite these facts, the deal for Shalit passed a cabinet vote by an overwhelming margin (26 in favor and only three opposed), and the vast majority of Israeli citizens support it. In agreeing to this prisoner swap, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli public chose to return to their roots, to revive a central tenet of old-time Israeli ideology: we do not leave our sons in the field.

The tenet is as old as the country itself. It stems from the fact that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is a citizens’ army, in which conscription is universal and every family knows that it could face the same tragedy as the Shalits. And in the army itself, the “stretcher march,” in which soldiers in training are ordered to carry one of their heaviest comrades on a stretcher up hills and down valleys for miles, is a formative ritual meant to instill one message: there is never a case in which soldiers cannot bring their wounded home.

This ethic is taught in other armies, too, but it resonates differently in Israel. From the moment of his capture, Gilad Shalit has been a household name. Compare this to the silence in the United States regarding Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier held hostage by the Taliban since June 2009. Ever since Shalit’s kidnapping, Israeli society has been wracked by a sense that it failed in its obligation to him.

By agreement with Foreign Affairs, the remainder of this article should be read on their website at the following link:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136550/daniel-gordis/why-netanyahu-made-the-prisoner-swap-deal-with-hamas

It wasn’t, I admit, a terribly charitable view of a serious discipline.  But I loved to see him laugh, so I enjoyed the pleasure the joke gave him.  I hadn’t thought of that line of his for a long time, until JTS, the very institution at which he was Professor of Bible, recently released its study of the attitudes of Conservative rabbis to Israel.

The study was prepared by Steven Cohen, an internationally respected sociologist and expert on contemporary American Jewry.  It was precipitated, apparently, by a column I first wrote for the Jerusalem Post (“Of Sermons and Strategies,” April 1, 2011), in which I worried that some number of young rabbinical students has become emotionally distanced from Israel.  I shared a number of anecdotes that seemed to me worrisome:  one student who needed a new tallit and who asked for advice as to where to purchase one, but who insisted that it must not have been made in Israel, or another student chose to celebrate his birthday with friends in a bar in Ramallah, with PLO posters still adorning the wall.  We are witness, I wrote then and still believe, to a significant shift in the attitudes of the future leaders of American Jewish life; without some major change, American support for Israel – which proved instrumental at the United Nations during the week before Rosh Hashanah – could well begin to wither.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was a longer piece I wrote in Commentary (June 2011), in which I argued that what is truly at play is not only this generation’s attitude to Israel, but rather, the fact that it is much more committed to universalism than it is to particularism.  They are much more comfortable seeing themselves as part of a global human family than they are extolling the virtues of belonging to a specific people.  Their attitudes to Israel follow from that.  For what animates them is not, first and foremost, the extraordinary rebirth of the Jewish people in its ancestral homeland, but rather, a conflict between an underdog (the Palestinians) and a massive military power (Israel).  Without a commitment to peoplehood and particularism, I suggested, such a generation simply will not feel an instinctive sense that its first obligation is the defense of the Jewish State.

And I had but one concrete suggestion: “Addressing that need is going to require that rabbinical schools cease circling the wagons, and instead acknowledge the depth of the challenge they now face.”

Oh, well.  For what is this newly released study if not a classic case of “circling the wagons”?  How surprised ought we to be that the study shows that rabbis’ attachments to Israel are still strong?  They’re just … well, different.  More support the positions of J-Street, while fewer support the view that they associate with AIPAC.  Which is, of course, precisely what I had suggested.  But you wouldn’t know that from the wagon-circling-association.  The Forward, not surprisingly, relished the apparent “disproof” of my thesis. (Haaretz ran a similar article; this, too, was no surprise.) “Study Debunks Daniel Gordis’ Claim That They Are Anti-Israel,” ran the Forward’s sub-headline.  But, of course, I had never said that these students are anti-Israel.  I had said that their attitudes to Israel are shifting.  And the study proves exactly that.

But that is not all that is worrisome about the study.

First (and I admit that this is more amusing than serious), the report’s author got the year of my graduation from JTS wrong.  I found myself actually hoping that the rest of his numbers were a bit more carefully compiled.  But who knows?

Second, and infinitely more important, is the astonishing fact that no one – not the Forward, not Haaretz, no other paper – pointed to the irony that it was JTS (one of the rabbinical schools about which I’d written) that commissioned the study.  Would we ask tobacco manufacturers to investigate the relationship between smoking and cancer?  Was even a pretense of objectivity no longer necessary?

Third, what we are witness to is a shift in emphasis from the particular to the universal, from an instinct that worries first about Israel’s need to survive to one in which Israel’s social flaws are paramount.  Understanding this shift requires lengthy qualitative interviews, not the sort of questionnaire that we (yes, I was also polled, though I didn’t participate) were sent via email so that results could be compiled quickly.  The stakes for the Jewish people are too high for us to pretend to have learned what we have not yet even studied.

And finally, we are to be comforted by the claim that this generation is simply more J-Street oriented?  We’re to find solace in their feeling best represented by an organization that called for a cease fire in Operation Cast Lead just hours after the war erupted, before Israel had accomplished anything?  That had said virtually nothing during all the years that Sderot was being shelled?  That lobbied Congress against a resolution condemning incitement in Palestinian Schools?  Or that was “unable to support” HR 867, which rejected the Goldstone Report as biased and unfair (a charge which Judge Richard Goldstone himself eventually acknowledged)?  How much more clearly could the JTS study have proved exactly what I’d said?

Sometimes, despite my grandfather’s quip, it’s just the case that sociology proves the true.  And what Cohen’s survey showed was that I was right – all of us who foresee an era of Israel battling for survival in the court of international opinion have cause for great concern.  Peter Beinart said it best in his much discussed New York Review of Books article:  “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”

Sadly, many rabbinical students are no exception to this observation.  But here’s the good news.  Beinart and I agree?  Perhaps this will be a year of miracles, after all.

As delegates gather in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly next week, the U.S. was seeking a last-minute compromise to delay a U.N. vote supporting Palestinian statehood. Turkey and Egypt have lent support to such a resolution, and American negotiators in the Middle East were in talks aimed at averting the U.N. vote. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel seemed intent on blocking it, and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority appeared equally determined to see it proceed. Is there a case to be made that Israel’s very survival depends on the creation of a stable and viable Palestinian state?

A brief column with a few other “debaters” on the New York Times Opinion Page today.

From the June issue of our publication, Daniel Gordis’s article ‘Are Young Rabbis Turning on Israel?’ has occasioned impassioned debate around the world, with a flood of responses coming into our offices by e-mail, through our website, and, yes, even in envelopes with stamps on them. This special letters section features comments from 15 of those who wrote in, with a significant response from Gordis.

An important conversation is unfolding. Presidents, deans of rabbinical schools, and their students have written to me saying that there is now more discussion of Israel on their campuses than there has been in years. That is a positive development. So, too, is the Jewish Theological Seminary’s recent decision to have Dr. Steven Cohen undertake the first ever study of “the Israel-related views of JTS-ordained rabbis and students.” Despite public protestations to the contrary, there is an emerging recognition of a real problem in the field, and we should be gratified that some institutions are now taking steps to think about it seriously.

Space here permits a specific response to only a few of the many letters I’ve received. John Wilmerding writes, “What peacemakers believe is that it is always possible to love all of humanity (and some of us, even all of creation) equitably.” Wilmerding, a well-known Quaker leader, comes from the tradition of Christian pacifism. There is much to admire about that tradition. But in this particular instance, the “peacemakers” are wrong. It is not possible, nor is it noble, to love the people who are trying to kill your children. Wilmerding’s poetic rhetorical flourish notwithstanding, the love he asks us to feel is not only unrealistic; it would be—in our situation—suicidal, and therefore immoral. But his request should not surprise us. For centuries, people have been holding the Jews to standards of behavior that they, themselves, would never have adopted if they were in the Jews’ shoes.

Commentary Magazine‘s policy is that articles must be read on the Commentary web site and cannot be posted in full here.  But Commentary has graciously agreed to make this article available even to those who are not yet subscribers.  You can read the remainder of the exchange here:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/an-exchange-on-are-young-rabbis-turning-on-israel/

Surrounded by nothing but trees, birds, water and a couple of wonderful friends, it all begins to melt away. The doctors’ strike, the omnipresent stinking piles of garbage on Jerusalem’s streets, the histrionic politics and the looming UN vote – it all fades with time.

As there’s little to do there but hike, kayak and read, I brought Yair Lapid’s recent – and truly wonderful – autobiography of his father (no, that’s not a typo) for the vacation. The book opens with Tommy Lapid’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Budapest. It’s a harrowing account, as most of them are, particularly when he notes following a narrow escape in a latrine that though he was alive, the danger had not passed. The Nazis and their collaborators were everywhere; there was simply no place to run.

Sobering, to put it mildly; but even Lapid’s exquisite writing couldn’t undo the placidity of the lake. The water was too calm, the forest too thick with the sounds of beavers and loons (real birds, not MKs) for those harrowing memories to undermine the calm. There’s no Internet in the cabin and hardly any 3G.

The world as we know it might as well have been a different planet. I felt I could have stayed there forever.

THERE WAS, though, one windowsill where you could leave your BlackBerry, where every now and then, a signal came through. So if you left the BB there overnight, chances were that in the morning, you could at least check your e-mail and not fall too far behind. A big mistake.

One morning I woke up and checked my e-mail. There wasn’t much, thankfully, but one from my brother caught my attention. “Is everyone OK?” was the subject line, with no text. But there didn’t need to be. An e-mail like that can mean only one thing. I got in the car, raced to town, bought a coffee I didn’t want so I could sit in the Wi-Fi equipped diner and read about what was unfolding on the southern border.

So much for calm that comes with falling asleep to the sound of crickets.

I spent most of the day by that windowsill, trying to coax my BlackBerry into getting the news. Details slowly emerged. Terrorists had infiltrated the Negev. Among others, two sisters, with their husbands on vacation, had been heading south when the border highway was blocked by gunmen who shot them each at point-blank range, an eyewitness said. The other stories were no less gruesome.

I spoke to someone reasonably high up in Intelligence, usually a bit too trusting of our “peace partners” for my taste, but very smart and always worth hearing out. Was this somehow connected to the upcoming September UN vote, I wondered? Not at all, he said. These attacks take months to plan. They launch them when they can.

“Then what’s the point?” I asked.  “What does this do for them?”

He laughed. “What do you mean, ‘What’s the point’? They wanted to kill Jews.”

Tommy Lapid came to mind. Seventy years later, there’s really still no place to run. You can be on vacation near Eilat with your husband, your sister and your brother-in-law, not in the “territories,” not near any contested border. And they block the highway and shoot you pointblank anyway – because “they wanted to kill Jews.” A different century. A different continent. A different enemy. Plus ça change.

ON THE way home, I stopped in New York for two days of meetings, including one with one of America’s leading Jewish journalists. She, too, is extraordinarily smart, cares about Israel and is worried.

She’s worried about the building in the settlements and what it does to the peace process. She’s horrified that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu insulted US President Barack Obama during the grand exchange of speeches a few months ago, and in so doing, embarrassed many American Jews. She’s perplexed by Israel’s not taking the necessary steps towards peace.

But she did see one cause for optimism – the tent city on Rothschild Boulevard.

A pity that Israel didn’t make more of that in the international press, she said.  Even her daughter was finally ecstatic about Israel. “Mom,” she’d called home from Tel Aviv and said, “This is totally awesome.” What did I think would come of the protests, my interlocutor wanted to know.

“Nothing,” I told her. Bibi had been in a bit of domestic trouble, but he got a new lease on life with the recent attacks. The protests would dwindle and the country would be forced to think about what it’s always forced to think about – keeping Jews alive.

She looked a bit puzzled, and the room grew quiet. We were both struck, I think, by the radically different ways in which we see the world. She was saddened by the attacks, but they seemed to her to be incidents. To me, though, they weren’t incidents. They are a way of life – for us and for them – and bespeak an insatiable hatred that follows us wherever we go. She believes, honestly and wholeheartedly, that if we just make peace, the violence will stop.

I used to believe that, and wish I still could. She’s desperate for us to make peace so we can turn our attention to social justice. And I think we’re going to need to learn to focus on social justice even while at war, because I see no chance that either she or I will live to see this conflict settled.

I LEFT her office struck by how similar were our values and how different our worldviews. And I had a sudden awareness – I’d had enough vacation. It was time to go home.

On the subway, I opened Lapid’s book. A couple of pages later (page 89 of the Hebrew edition), I read this: “For 60 years, I lived in the State of Israel, and my identification with it was absolute…. [I knew] that I was in the only place in which a Jew can live, the only place that I could live…. The ghetto taught me that I needed a place I could go, but nothing prepared me for the power of having found that place.”

Not surprisingly, Lapid got it right again. There is a simple and inexplicable power to being home. It makes you no safer, and it may, in fact, make you a target. But choosing a home like that promotes clarity; it forces you to decide what you believe in that is more important than your own survival. You know that even when you’re home, there’s nowhere to run. And still, despite it all – or rather, because of it all – you know there’s no place you’d rather be.